Quotations

_ – About the fight against drug trafficking
_ – About tax havens
_ – About having the capacity to listen and being willing to believe

About the fight against drug trafficking
The ban and repression-based approach has not managed to reduce plantations, use or trafficking. A key factor is missing: the reduction in demand, with the addict being treated as a public health concern. Society criticizes the violence, the corruption that drug trafficking brings about, but it is with the money raised from their own consumption that these groups are financed. They have to understand this.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso

About tax havens

The US Congress commissioned a survey about tax havens, which was completed in December 2008. Some of its results include:
– Eighty-three of the one hundred largest US corporations reported having subsidiaries in some of the fifty jurisdictions identified as tax havens.
– In addition, 74 of those 83 corporations had contracts with the federal government in fiscal year 2007.
– One single company among those 83, operating in the financial sector, acknowledged having 427 subsidiaries in different jurisdictions deemed as tax havens.

When financial institutions establish subsidiaries in offshore banking centres, they are able not only to take advantage of systems with no or low-tax regimes, but also to elude regulatory requirements in the jurisdictions where they operate, and this dramatically amplifies the risks in the financial system’s operation.

United States Congress Report, quoted by Jesús Rodriguez in his article ¿El fin de los refugios fiscales? (The End of Tax Havens?), published in La Nación daily, on April 1, 2009.

About having the capacity to listen and being willing to believe
We need to practise the difficult skill on which democracy is founded: the skill to listen to somebody else and be willing to believe him.

Martín Böhmer

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